Boys' Toys

New Video Games Deliver More Bang For More Bucks

May 27, 1999|By Dan Dinello. Special to the Tribune.

But Carmack, 28, spoke excitedly about Quake III. "It's fundamentally the same game we've been doing -- the same runaround first-person shooter. But it's a lot more fun. We've got a threadbare story about pulling the greatest warriors from different eras to give us an excuse to put the Doom guy and one of the Quake II (women) in there. It's designed, from the ground up, for graphics acceleration and networked play."

Another multiplayer-only, first-person shooter game, Team Fortress 2, focuses on social activity and cooperative killing. Project leader Gabe Newell won two Academy of Interactive Arts and Science Awards during the expo: Action Game of the Year and Computer Game of the Year for Half-Life, the suspenseful first person shooter.

"In Team Fortress, we want to emphasize interaction with friends, so we've developed real time speech synthesis so you can talk to your friends during the game," he said. Incredibly, your game character mouths the words that you speak to the other player/characters.

Technical sophistication aside, the games of the future displayed a paucity of imagination in ideas and content. Promoted as a vision of the new, the exposition re-ran the past with tons of sequels, re-makes and TV/movie/comic book spin-offs such as Pong, Toy Story 2, The Wild Wild West, The Dukes of Hazzard, Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Star Wars and Star Trek. Visually gorgeous new games, such as Romero's Daikatana, rehash the comic book formula of the macho superhero that saves the world.

As for work that rises above a comic book mentality, Newell said: "Traditionally, games involving stories tend to be about mastery and dominance, and that's a really adolescent fantasy, but games may be starting to mature. Eidos' Deus Ex will be a work of art."

Other games that look different include Bungie's Oni, which meshes Japanese anime-styled art with a female hero out of "La Femme Nikita," and dance-oriented Um Jammer Lammy, whose female rock band story may interest girls.

Massive multiplayer, Internet role-playing games like Ultima: Ascension and EverQuest involve the exploration of fantastic worlds rather than macho bombast; world-building games like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri demand thought and strategy.

"I think a game should have an element of the real world, where you can learn about economics, history, and technology while having fun," said Meier, co-creator of Civilization and winner of the Interactive Arts and Science's Hall of Fame Award. "The trend toward more graphic and unnecessary depictions of violence in a few games is an unwelcome development."